This is a very important message, i am considering to partially drop the idea of "100%" procedurally generated zones. Procedural Generation have its advantages but a lot of drawbacks, it is very hard to do very detailed and logics places and it tend to be a bit boring because the procedural generation use some fixed rules that make the different places very similar to each other. Also it is very difficult to integrate some interesting and interesting things to do inside a procedurally generated worlds. Actually I am spending more time to debug the world generation code than coding more interesting gameplay things and i got a lot of emails of players that say that the procedural generation even if it sound good, is boring. And i tend to be agree with that. I don't want to be artistically limited in the future because of this so i am thinking to change the way of how the zones are built in the game.

So i would like to build an advanced 3D zone editor and use it to build the world of Dangerous Rays, this mean that buildings would be placed by hand and always at the same position like DayZ map for example, random building interior generation would still be used as it is a great feature, some other elements like vegetation could still be randomized so we are keeping some interesting features of the procedural generation. But placing the buildings and road network by hand could really improve by 200% the look of the game and should be far more interesting in terms of gameplay as we could setup some very special thing like a well leading to a giant cave, very detailed villages, realistic sewer system, train tracks, cities... Controlling the placements of things can open a whole new world of possibilities for us. Another interesting part of this is that players would also have access to the same powerful editor that we would use to build the official world of Dangerous Rays. Players could build there worlds or just playing with the game assets and make some funny constructions, and then share it with other players. I think this would add more value to the game and make the game more interesting.

So let's discuss about it and please answer this poll (above this post). Thank you !

Personally, I think procedural generation is a tool best used to extend the productivity of a small dev team with less important and non-story-driven elements such as random mobs, loot, and possibly side quests. Procedural quests or story elements are rarely, if ever, engaging. I'm not sure anyone has done this successfully yet. Just my two cents.

Seems like a good decision. Since the game is heavily inspired by Stalker wich is famous for it's very well crafted levels, a more traditionnal approach will probably improve the game ambiance.
To quote John Carmack : "Procedural generation is just a form of (crappy) compression".

I really like the idea of a world editor, but, If I may suggest, it will be great to keep the procedural generation system for some transitionnal zones. It will be interresting, since procedural generation is generaly more effective on natural elements. However, actual zones are probably too big for this purpose, except for a hunting area of course

Acetone wrote:Seems like a good decision. Since the game is heavily inspired by Stalker wich is famous for it's very well crafted levels, a more traditionnal approach will probably improve the game ambiance.
To quote John Carmack : "Procedural generation is just a form of (crappy) compression".

I really like the idea of a world editor, but, If I may suggest, it will be great to keep the procedural generation system for some transitionnal zones. It will be interresting, since procedural generation is generaly more effective on natural elements. However, actual zones are probably too big for this purpose, except for a hunting area of course

Anyway, keep up the good work !

I think Acetone has said it perfectly - totally agree.

"So i would like to build an advanced 3D zone editor and use it to build the world of Dangerous Rays, this mean that buildings would be placed by hand and always at the same position like DayZ map for example, random building interior generation would still be used as it is a great feature, some other elements like vegetation could still be randomized so we are keeping some interesting features of the procedural generation."